Monday, July 20, 2015

It’s a bit surreal announcing your retirement over Facebook. Wonderful, supportive comments flow in from former colleagues, students, family and friends. It’s like attending your own funeral while you’re still alive. And, at some level, I suppose retirement is a death of sorts.

It has been deeply gratifying to read these comments and to sense that perhaps my life as a teacher has actually made a difference in the world. With no biological children of my own, it is the students I have known in my long career as a teacher who will carry on whatever legacy I might have bequeathed them. Hearing these words of support from those whose lives I have touched and which have in turn touched my own has been truly wonderful even in this somewhat surreal cyber cemetery. I am grateful for every comment.

Soul searching, Isle of Iona, Scotland, UK July 7, 2015

A Very Long List of Givers

I came to the university
somewhat unexpectedly, having just completed my Ph.D. at Florida State and suddenly
finding myself feeling strangely out of place at the community college where I had
taught off and on for 12 years sandwiched around seminary and grad school. I
had no guarantee of anything when I left my tenure line at Valencia and began
teaching as an adjunct at UCF. Fortune smiled upon me as I landed first a
visiting instructor line, four years later a permanent instructorship and two
years ago saw my job description change to assistant lecturer.

Now, 13 years later, I unexpectedly
find myself retiring at 62. In reviewing that history I am reminded of a
rabbinical proverb which is one of my favorite sayings: “If you want to make
G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.”

As I assess my 13 years at
the University of Central Florida, I am struck by the many aspects of my life there
for which I am grateful. I am a strong believer in expressing gratitude. Most
of the primal religions of the world which preceded and in some cases have
survived the rise of major world religions are centered on gratitude. I observe
that gratitude is too often a lost practice in an insatiable consumerist world
of instant gratification. And so let me take a moment to enumerate some of the
people and their contributions to my life for which I am grateful.

First of all, I am deeply grateful
for the department chair who encouraged me to apply for the visiting line
instructor position I eventually won. It was my entree into the university at a
point I was deeply uncertain of where I needed to be and what I needed to be doing.
I am also grateful for the department who agreed to hire me after just a year
of adjuncting for them. They took a chance on me and I am thankful.

I am grateful for the many,
many fine students I have had the privilege to know at the university. They
have taught me much, stretched me, enriched my life, moved my heart and challenged
my soul. I watch their progress in the worlds they are creating and I feel no
small amount of pride and excitement for them. No longer their teacher, I am now
proud to call many my friends. I am decidedly a better person for having known
them and I know the world will be a better place because of them. For the
privilege of playing a small role in their lives I am deeply grateful.

I am also grateful for the
very fine people I have worked with at the Philosophy Department beginning with
the very fine office staff and student assistants whose assistance in doing my
own job has always been indispensable. Their hard work and their value to the
department is rarely recognized. But without them, the department simply could
not function. I want to extend my deepest thanks to them and to wish them
G-dspeed.

I am deeply grateful to
those I have called colleagues for 13 years. Just conversing with them day to
day has inevitably proven stimulating and challenging. As a result I have
continued to learn and grow as a result of constant exposure to new ideas,
thinkers and systems of thought. It has been a privilege to work with so many
very bright and thoughtful people. They have changed my life and for that I am
deeply grateful and I am proud to call many of them my friends. As one of my
colleagues said in her note to me, “I look forward to seeing you outside the
factory.”

Indeed.

I am also very grateful to
the regional campus staff at Osceola Campus, Kississimmee, who took me in and
made me feel a part of that campus family. One of my great regrets in leaving
UCF is that the active teaching we had all hoped would happen there never was
able to develop. But I thank everyone in that very fine office staff and
administration who did their best to try to make that happen.

I am grateful to a very fine
library staff whose helpfulness in helping faculty locate research and
classroom materials which may or may not be on-site is matched by its
willingness to help largely disinterested students become familiar with the
workings of an actual library. Like many of us today, their jobs are performed in
the growing shadow of major changes that may well render libraries and higher education
very different animals from their current incarnation in the near future.

There are also many unsung
heroes at the university for whom I am grateful. I give thanks for the men and
women who regularly clean our classrooms and offices, buildings long since
pushed well past their capacities by an irresponsible admissions policy at an overcrowded
credentials factory. Their work in the routine cleaning of these overtaxed
facilities is no doubt a challenge. I am grateful for the many clerks and
secretaries, grounds crews and maintenance people, food preparers and vendors
whose labor ensures that the university can work properly. And while I question
the wisdom and the cost of the bloated bureaucracy that our corporate management
has created as well as the security forces that periodically provide glaring examples
of how not to police a college
campus, I recognize that without them, this ever expanding leviathan that the
university has become could not function. Begrudgingly, I am grateful for them
as well.

Deep Gratitude for Their Many Gifts

Fulbright scholars at Carneval show, Rio de Janeiro 2011

I am grateful for the
opportunities I have had to continue growing and learning as a scholar and as a
human being because of my affiliation with the university. Over my 13 years
there, I have been able to continue my love for learning in seven foreign
countries representing four different languages. I was able to become a
Fulbright scholar, a fellow at an NEH seminar on global ethics and a
Schusterman Institute fellow in Israel Studies. My world has expanded greatly as
a result of my time at the university and for that I am grateful.

I am grateful for the
recognition my work has upon occasion received from the university. In particular
I am grateful for being named to one of 10 Excellence in Undergraduate
Education awards university-wide in 2009 and for my Outstanding evaluations in
my department for nine of the last 11 years. It is these kinds of moral rewards
that keep many of us going in jobs whose financial compensation rarely reflects
the quality or the quantity of service we offer and whose often untenable work
conditions make such offerings a sacrifice on a good day.

I am also begrudgingly grateful
for the years I spent teaching in the Honors College. A challenge on a good
day, a major pain on the worst (no one does entitlement better than honors
students or self-congratulatory elitism better than honors college staffs), I
did come to know some truly outstanding young men and women there. More than
that, I am grateful for the many fine students I helped navigate through the
Honors in the Majors program. They are among the young Jedis I have been
privileged to assist in the long process of finding their voices. I truly
believe they have much to say and with that the ability to change the world.

One of my greatest reasons
for gratitude is a little orange tabby once feral cat who came to live at our
home as a result of the efforts of our office manager who served in our campus
feral cat feeding program. When an apartment building the university had been
renting changed hands and its management decided to liquidate the feral cat
colony living in its parking lot, our office manager managed to capture this
beautiful little girl and asked me if I could take her. The cat registered her response
to this new arrangement once at my home by promptly opening a two inch long running
wound on my right hand which still bears the scar. She lived behind our water
heater in the utility room for the first six weeks of her time here.

My students named her Frida given
my love for the Mexicana artist and, gradually warming up to life inside a
house with two human animals, two other cats and two dogs, she has become one
of the great joys in my life these last eight years. Frida never grew much and
even now is about the size of a large kitten. I greet “my little golden dew
drop” each day when I come into give her a kiss good morning on her perch atop
the water heater. She organizes snack time each morning for all five of the
animals by loudly and insistently reminding me beginning about 9 AM that “It’s
SNACK time!” and bumping my leg with her
head by about 10 AM if I ignore her. For this little love of my life whom I deeply
cherish I will always be grateful.

Most of all, I am grateful
that the timing of my employment at the university allowed me to retire when
the time came for me to finally leave the factory and not simply quit with
nothing to show for it. My retirement check after 20 years working for the
State of Florida will, not surprisingly, be rather minimal. (At least I won’t
have to pee in a cup to get it) But it will serve as an unemployment
compensation of sorts for the time being as I lick my wounds, catch my breath
and discern my next calling in life.

I am not unmindful that many
people end up stuck at jobs which, like mine, come to make their lives
miserable and yet do not have the option to leave. For the privilege of being
able to depart on my own schedule, to not lose my medical coverage in the
process (because my husband’s policy at Valencia will cover me), to rest and
recover before beginning the search for the next chapter of my life, I am
profoundly grateful.

Finally, for the many people
whose lives have played a role in my own whom I may have neglected to mention
here, I ask your pardon. I take no one for granted, receive no gift without
gratitude and I assure you that I am thankful for your role in my life.

Saturday, July 04, 2015

It’s Independence Day in the
United States of America. In years past, this was the day for chasing greased
pigs in the local park, for eating watermelon in abundance and lots of fried
chicken. It’s a day when every flag dealer in the world (including the
factories in China which make most of them these days) would have a big day as
flags are waved from holiday celebrations to national monuments to used car
lots.

If history is any guide to this
day in Central Florida, before the day is over we will have a thunderstorm, its
cloud-to-ground lightning a prelude to evening pyrotechnics which will light up
our skies - and frighten our dogs and our veterans suffering from PTSD. My guess
is that history will repeat itself today, perhaps minus the grease if the pig
is lucky.

“What in the hell is wrong with America?”

I have just returned to this
country I have called home for nearly 62 years after a three week sojourn
through parts of western Europe and Canada. I was in the middle of France
awaiting my engagement with the Taize community when I saw television news for
the first time in nearly three weeks. The BBC was reporting on a shooting at a
church in Charleston. Eight people were dead and a young white shooter who had
been welcomed into their midst for a prayer meeting was being intensively
sought. The next day the Taize monks would pray for the people of Charleston
and for America as it sought to find its way out of the darkness of violence.

As I began my long journey home,
from Taize to Geneva, Switzerland by bus and train and then my 18 hour flight
from Geneva to Orlando with a three hour layover in Montreal, again and again I
heard discussions of the events of Charleston. Virtually all of them focused
around the pointed question, “What in the hell is wrong with America?”

This was my fourth trip to
Europe over my lifetime. I love Europe. Each country has its own charms from
the warmth and wines of Italia to the collected brain power and vibrant culture
in Geneva to the rocky pastures full of beautiful sheep and the dry humor of
Scotland. There is much in Europe that America could learn from beginning with
sane policies regulating the weapons of war in their societies whose low gun
mortality rate reflect those policies.

It is tempting to dream of
what it would be like to leave behind an America whose electoral politics have
devolved into an auction to the highest moneyed bidder, whose criminal system insists
upon locking up inordinate proportions of its population, particularly its
young men of color. Europe has found a way to end its “tinker(ing) with the machinery
of death” as our own Supreme Court Justice Blackmun once described our bloody system of
state killing in which the chances are one in 10 that an innocent human being
will be murdered.

It is tempting to leave behind a failing
educational system whose public schools test our children to death destroying
their love of learning in the process and whose higher education has largely become
mass production factories which stamp out worker drones with a modicum of
vocational training but limited capacities for critical thought. Most of Europe’s
elementary and secondary international test scores surpass those of their American
counterparts and many universities, while selectively admitting students,
provide tuition-free higher educations to them. Their graduates do not emerge
from four years of largely vocational training saddled in crippling debt.

Of course Europe has its own
problems. It faces the same surge of increasingly desperate immigrants seeking
to escape a southern hemisphere cursed with natural resources and cannibalized
by voracious northern hemisphere consumers. The news in Italy last summer was
full of accounts of flimsy boats packed with human cargo disintegrating within
sight of European shores, their occupants suddenly finding themselves in sea
water but unable to swim even that short distance to the coast.

Europe’s monetary problems
are also well known here in the US where corporate media are more than willing
to report stories of austerity measures and resistance in places like Greece
and Spain if for no other reason than to bolster consumer confidence in our own
floundering and increasingly inequitable system. In some places like the UK, the corporatization of higher
education and the consumerization of their student bodies increasingly mimic
American practice. And ancient and even more recent class distinctions still
hold European society within their grasp making social mobility largely impossible in many aspects
of life there.

A Prescient Framer

Over the past few years as I have struggled to
decide what I should do with what remains of my life, I have often dreamed of
escaping to Europe.Geneva is a hub of
international work on concerns I have served all my life: education, justice,
religion. It is a vibrant city largely dominated by international
banking with an exorbitant cost of living but whose side benefits are the
ability to speak with people on the city buses in a wide range of languages
about a wide range of subjects. What might a man with graduate degrees in law,
religion and a doctorate combining the two who has varying degrees of
proficiency in several languages find to do there?

And yet it is in the street cafés
of Geneva where between my tortured French and the occasional bursts of Spanish
and English I can more readily comprehend that I heard that question: “What in
the hell is wrong with America?” It is a question that haunts me.

It is also a fair question.
While Europeans may well pose it rhetorically out of a sense of cultural
superiority, the context of the question – the shootings in Charleston of
people at worship in a church – makes it impossible for this American and any
of my countrymen and women who truly care about our country to ignore it.
Churches have long been places of asylum. Their very precincts are seen as
sacred. To turn such holy ground into a human slaughterhouse is truly an
abomination.

The events in Charleston
reveal two of a number of malignancies within the American soul today: the
cancer of racism and the cancer of gun violence. These two realities belie the
many ideals that we as Americans celebrate this day. The former reminds us that
while “liberty and justice for all” are our stated ideals, their achievement
still lies in the future. The latter reminds us that we remain an adolescent
society, focused on rights while ignoring the duties to others that flow from
them. It reminds us that an individualism pursued at the expense of community
can only result in isolation and atomization, a gaping hole in the soul that no
amount of consumer goods can ever fill.

James Madison’s Preamble has
proven prescient as it spoke of our duty as Americans to pursue “a more perfect
union.” On the one hand he was humble enough to reject the unlimited optimism
of his own Enlightenment culture which suggested perfection was within the
grasp of reason-driven human beings. On the other hand, he did not lapse into a
determinism that let his countrymen and women off the hook for its imperfections
as simply “the way things are.” While we may never achieve perfection in the
pursuit of ideals we say we hold –a just society which promotes the general welfare of all
of us and not the interests of the few at the expense of the many – we are always
charged with the ongoing responsibility of seeking it.

Pursuing a More Perfect Union

As I sat in the café in
Geneva nursing my beer bought with the last of my Swiss francs, I thought about
my country and my place in it. I have long operated out of the maxim that we like
people because but we love people in spite of. And some give us a lot to work
with in that latter category. The same is true of America.

For better or worse, it is
my homeland and I love it. I never fail to get a lump in my throat when passing
by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and it is always a joyous moment for
me when our flight touches down on American soil. But I think the Europeans are
raising an important question: “What is wrong with America?” And that question contains
a second, more immediate question: “And what are you going to do about it?”

As I approach the next phase
of my life, those are important questions. And, frankly, they should be for all
Americans. While we have nothing to prove to anyone outside our borders, we are
indicted by our own ideals as a people when our actions fall short within those
borders.

Those indictments cannot be
met by America’s sons and daughters fleeing to more sanguine shores to wait out a potential
apocalypse. They also cannot be met by blustering rhetoric which demands
Americans join in a mindless mantra of “We’re Number One!” when everything
around us suggests just the opposite. Patriotism means the love of one’s
country, with all its warts, not the indulgence of a feel good denial. The
demands of our homeland seeking the achievement of a more perfect union call
us. And as life-long beneficiaries of its goodness and bounty, it is our duty
to respond.

For those of us born amidst a
Cold War in the shadows of WWII, a world where American dominance was countered
by Soviet might, the world we encounter today is a new and strange place. Our military,
largest in the world by far, flounders in quagmires in the middle east and
central Asia, places our school children and most of their parents cannot locate on a map. Our sons and daughters
are returning to our midst from these places with overwhelming physical and mental wounds unheard
of in previous conflicts to poorly funded public medical facilities long since
overtaxed in their abilities to meet these new demands.

Around the world our
economic might meets new challengers from a European Union and from increasingly
powerful Asian giants. Within our nation we see signs of disintegration from
the abandonment of social responsibility to public institutions to talk of secession not heard in a
century and a half. And on our city streets, gang violence thriving on a failed
drug policy encounters an increasingly militarized police in highly publicized exchanges. Here the cancers of racism and the dangers of a society armed to the teeth and
worked into a fearful frenzy by sensationalist media are exposed in their rawness.

We have our work cut out for
us if we wish to remain “One nation… with liberty and justice for all.” G-d
will not save us from ourselves. And our
problems, unlike our teeth, will not go
away if we ignore them.

This day I express my
gratitude for the country which has provided me with a standard of living that
is unheard of by the vast majority of our planet’s populations. Evenas I say this I am not unmindful of those
around the world at whose expense that privilege has come. I give thanks to my
teachers who taught me the ideals of my native land and for those few responsible
leaders who continue to call us to meet them.

This day, I once again pledge
myself to the calling of making America what it says it is, a land of liberty
and justice for all. I once again enjoin the pursuit of a more perfect union
and call my fellow Americans to join me in that endeavor. Let us remember that
as Americans, we are called to nothing less.

About Me

I am a fifth generation Floridian, a fourth generation educator, third generation college educator. My great grandparents were named Reed and Wright so I guess it was fate that I would end up a teacher. I am a recovering lawyer who still holds an inactive license with the Florida Bar (I stopped practice in 1990) and an ordained Episcopal priest. My spirituality is that of an inner world (nature) mystic. I am Franciscan to my very core, a professed member of 26 years in the Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF). Andy , my gentle souled, soft-spoken partner of 44 years became my legal husband in 2010 on the steps of the US Supreme Court. He is G-d's greatest gift to my life. I live within two hours of my nuclear family members. Historically I have been a yellow dawg Democrat though my politics are decidedly Green. I hold a Ph.D. in Religion, Law and Society from FSU, an M.Div. from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, member seminary of the GTU in Berkeley, CA, and a J.D. and a B.A. in History and Secondary Ed from the University of Florida. I complete a two year program at Richard Rohr’s Living School for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, NM August 2017.